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Submission + - Good Friday March 29th On This Solemn Occasion, May The Love Of christ Fill Y (facebook.com)
#GoodFriday #EasterWeekend #PeaceAndLove
#ChristLove #Gratitude #Renewal
#FaithJourney #SpiritualReflection
#BlessingsOfEaster #ChristianCommunity
Submission + - Canonical Now Doing Manual Reviews For New Packages Due To Scam Apps (gamingonlinux.com)
So to try and do something about it, Canonical's Holly Hall has posted on their Discourse forum about how "The Store team and other engineering teams within Canonical have been continuously monitoring new snaps that are being registered, to detect potentially malicious actors" and that they will now do manual reviews whenever people try to register "a new snap name." On top of that soon they will also be releasing a new policy regarding "crypto-wallet and other sensitive snaps" with "guidelines for how to publish such a snap." Currently all of this is not supposed to be long-term, as it's an evolving situation.
Submission + - Methane From Landfills Is a Big Driver of Climate Change, Study Says (nytimes.com)
For the new study, scientists gathered data from airplane flyovers using a technology called imaging spectrometers designed to measure concentrations of methane in the air. Between 2018 and 2022, they flew planes over 250 sites across 18 states, about 20 percent of the nation’s open landfills. At more than half the landfills they surveyed, researchers detected emissions hot spots, or sizable methane plumes that sometimes lasted months or years. That suggested something had gone awry at the site, like a big leak of trapped methane from layers of long-buried, decomposing trash, the researchers said.
“You can sometimes get decades of trash that’s sitting under the landfill,” said Daniel H. Cusworth, a climate scientist at Carbon Mapper and the University of Arizona, who led the study. “We call it a garbage lasagna.” Many landfills are fitted with specialized wells and pipes that collect the methane gas that seeps out of rotting garbage in order to either burn it off or sometimes to use it to generate electricity or heat. But those wells and pipes can leak. The researchers said pinpointing leaks doesn’t just help scientists get a better picture of emissions, it also helps landfill operators fix leaks. Keeping more waste out of the landfill, for example by composting food scraps, is another fix.
Submission + - Nigerian Woman Faces Jail Time For Facebook Review Of Tomato Sauce (techdirt.com)
By now you’re wondering what actually happened here. Well, Okoli got on Facebook after having tried a can of Nagiko Tomato Mix, made by local Nigerian company Erisco Foods. Her initial post essentially complained about it being too sugary. So pretty standard fair for a review-type post on Facebook. When she started getting some mixed replies, some of them told her to stop trying to ruin the company and just buy something else, with one such message supposedly coming from a relative of the company’s ownership. To that, she replied: "Okoli responded: 'Help me advise your brother to stop ki***ing people with his product, yesterday was my first time of using and it’s pure sugar.'"
By the way, you can see all of this laid out by Erisco Foods itself on its own Facebook page. The company also claims that she exchanged messages with others talking about how she wanted to trash the product online so that nobody would buy it and that sort of thing. Whatever the truth about that situation is, this all stems from a poor review of a product posted online, which is the kind of speech countries with free speech laws typically protect. In Okoli’s case, she was arrested shortly after those posts. [...] Okoli is pregnant and was placed in a cell during her arrest that had water leaking into it, by her account. She was also forced to apologize to Erisco Foods as part of her bond release, which she then publicly stated was done under duress and refused to apologize once out of holding.
Submission + - Core PostgreSQL developer dies in airplane crash (postgresql.org)
Riggs was responsible for much of the enterprise-level features in PostgreSQL including point-in-time recovery, synchronous replication, and hot standby. He also was the head of the company 2ndQuadrant that provides PostgreSQL support.
Submission + - Oregon Signs Nation's First Right-To-Repair Bill That Bans Parts Pairing (arstechnica.com)
Oregon's bill isn't stronger in every regard. For one, there is no set number of years for a manufacturer to support a device with repair support. Parts pairing is prohibited only on devices sold in 2025 and later. And there are carve-outs for certain kinds of electronics and devices, including video game consoles, medical devices, HVAC systems, motor vehicles, and—as with other states—"electric toothbrushes."
Submission + - Recent 'MFA Bombing' Attacks Targeting Apple Users (krebsonsecurity.com)
What sanely designed authentication system would send dozens of requests for a password change in the span of a few moments, when the first requests haven’t even been acted on by the user? Could this be the result of a bug in Apple’s systems? Kishan Bagaria is a hobbyist security researcher and engineer who founded the website texts.com (now owned by Automattic), and he’s convinced Apple has a problem on its end. In August 2019, Bagaria reported to Apple a bug that allowed an exploit he dubbed “AirDoS” because it could be used to let an attacker infinitely spam all nearby iOS devices with a system-level prompt to share a file via AirDrop — a file-sharing capability built into Apple products.
Apple fixed that bug nearly four months later in December 2019, thanking Bagaria in the associated security bulletin. Bagaria said Apple’s fix was to add stricter rate limiting on AirDrop requests, and he suspects that someone has figured out a way to bypass Apple’s rate limit on how many of these password reset requests can be sent in a given timeframe. “I think this could be a legit Apple rate limit bug that should be reported,” Bagaria said.
Submission + - Lawsuit from X against anti-hate speech group dismissed by judge (arstechnica.com)
A US judge has struck down a lawsuit brought by X against a nonprofit group that researched toxic content on the social media platform, finding the Elon Musk-owned company’s case appeared to be an attempt at “punishing” the group for exercising free speech.
Submission + - 'Operation 404' Results in First Prison Sentence for Pirate IPTV Operator (torrentfreak.com)
Flash IPTV was a relatively large IPTV service with 13,547 active users at its peak. According to local news reports, the service generated $912,000 in revenue over twelve months, before it was taken offline in 2020 as part of the second ‘Operation 404’ campaign. Speaking with TorrentFreak, ALIANZA says that this is a historic verdict, as it’s the first criminal IPTV prosecution linked to ‘Operation 404’ in Brazil. “We appreciate the commitment of the police and judicial authorities in resolving this important case. The conviction of A.W.A.P. is a milestone that reinforces our commitment to defending the rights of creators and fighting against illegal practices that harm the creative economy,” says Víctor Roldan, ALIANZA’s executive director.
While Operation 404 resulted in many arrests over the years, follow-up prosecutions have been rare in Brazil. Previously, ALIANZA did score a similar victory in Ecuador, where the operator of the pirate IPTV service IPTVlisto.com was sentenced to a year in prison. Last fall, Brazilian authorities conducted the sixth wave of Operation 404 and more are expected to follow in the future. These enforcement initiatives are broadly praised by rightsholders and the recent conviction will only strengthen their support.
Submission + - Boffins create new material that converts CO2 to methanol using sunlight (scitechdaily.com)
Submission + - Chrome is working on Tab Declutter on Android (windowsreport.com)
The Arc browser for desktops also has a similar feature, alongside the mobile version of Firefox, and with the new ARM Chrome version just released, we might see Tab Declutter trickle down to Chrome for Windows.
Submission + - Growing Up Ballmer 1
Interestingly, when Pete finally did get a life-changing windfall, it didn't come from his parents. "After college," Ballmer explains, "I never considered not having a job, so I became a product manager at a game development company [he's a Stanford CS grad]. Then I inherited a sum of money from my grandfather when I turned 25. He had worked his way up to middle management at Ford and put the money he saved into Microsoft stock, which did pretty well and ended up being worth hundreds of thousands of dollars by the time I received it. When I first heard about it, I was a junior in college. My initial reaction was that I would decline it — I was still pretty uncomfortable with my family's wealth and figured I could get a pretty high-paying job in tech and wouldn't need their money. But then I turned 25, and I didn't decline the money; in retrospect, that would have been a very silly decision. I'd also started doing standup comedy in college and continued doing it on the side while I worked. After about four years of working as a product manager, I quit to pursue comedy full-time."
For now, Ballmer is leading a modest life compared to some billionaires' kids ("I live in a two-bed, one-bath apartment") but notes, "As we're all older now, our family has started talking more proactively and intentionally about money. We've talked about what our wills might consist of, what happens to the Clippers — which my dad owns — once my parents have passed, how having the money affects what we choose to do career-wise, how the money has or has not 'corrupted' us, and the wariness we all have around money's general ability to do that to people."
Submission + - Crypto Miner, Pennsylvania Hit With Lawsuit Over Pollution From Bitcoin Mine (reuters.com)
The group said Stronghold has created a public and private nuisance by releasing mercury into waterways and spewing harmful chemicals like sulfur dioxide into the air from an aging power plant it bought to power its energy-thirsty operations. The state has issued permits allowing the pollution and subsidized the crypto-mine through tax incentives despite having an affirmative duty in the state constitution to protect the environment for its citizens, according to the lawsuit.
Submission + - Elon Musk Fought Government Surveillance While Profiting From It (theintercept.com)
Under the new ownership of Elon Musk, X had continued the litigation, until its defeat in January. The suit was aimed at overturning a governmental ban on disclosing the receipt of requests, known as national security letters, that compel companies to turn over everything from user metadata to private direct messages. Companies that receive these requests are typically legally bound to keep the request secret and can usually only disclose the number they’ve received in a given year in vague numerical ranges.
In its petition to the Supreme Court last September, X’s attorneys took up the banner of communications privacy: “History demonstrates that the surveillance of electronic communications is both a fertile ground for government abuse and a lightning-rod political topic of intense concern to the public.” After the court declined to take up the case in January, Musk responded tweeting, “Disappointing that the Supreme Court declined to hear this matter.”
The court’s refusal to take the case on ended X’s legal bid, but the company and Musk had positioned themselves at the forefront of a battle on behalf of internet users for greater transparency about government surveillance.
However, emails between the U.S. Secret Service and the surveillance firm Dataminr, obtained by The Intercept from a Freedom of Information Act request, show X is in an awkward position, profiting from the sale of user data for government surveillance purposes at the same time as it was fighting secrecy around another flavor of state surveillance in court.
Submission + - US Sanctions Spree Continues With 15 More For Russian Entities (theregister.com)
"Many of the individuals and entities designated today facilitated transactions or offered other services that helped OFAC-designated entities evade sanctions," an OFAC statement read. "These designations build upon OFAC's February 23, 2024 action to target companies servicing Russia's core financial infrastructure and curtail Russia's use of the international financial system to further its war against Ukraine." They follow the initial seven sanctions announced on Monday, all relating to Chinese nationals and members of Beijing's APT31 offensive cyber outfit.
Submission + - Nvidia Wants to Replace Nurses With AI for $9 an Hour (gizmodo.com) 1
“Voice-based digital agents powered by generative AI can usher in an age of abundance in healthcare, but only if the technology responds to patients as a human would,” said Kimberly Powell, vice president of Healthcare at NVIDIA in a press release Monday.
Nvidia is powering Hippocratic’s real-time responses over video calls. In a demo posted by Nvidia, a semi-human-looking AI agent named Rachel verbally instructs a patient on how to take penicillin. The agent then tells the patient it will report back all this information to her real human doctor. Rachel is one of many AI nurses that healthcare providers can choose from, according to one of Hippocratic’s product pages. The AI nurses range in specialties from “Colonoscopy Screening” to “Breast Cancer Care Manager,” all for less than minimum wage.
Hippocratic directly promotes how it can undercut the living wages of real nurses as a feature, not a bug. One page of the company’s website compares a human nurse’s $90 per hour salary to an AI agent’s $9 an-hour running costs. Hippocratic claims its AI nurses outperform human nurses regarding bedside manner, education, and narrowly miss on satisfaction, according to a survey.
The AI company working with Nvidia says its generative AI nurses are not sufficient to make diagnoses. The AI healthcare agent is trained to engage a human when appropriate.
Submission + - Reddit May Need To Ramp Up Spending On Content Moderation, Analysts Say (reuters.com)
Depending on volunteers is not sustainable, given the regulatory scrutiny that the company will now face, said Julian Klymochko, CEO of alternative investment solutions firm Accelerate Financial Technologies. "It's like relying on unpaid labor when the company has nearly a billion dollars in revenue," he added. Reddit reported revenue of $804 million in 2023, according to an earlier filing. Reddit will need to make substantial investments in trust and safety, which could lead to a "dramatic" rise in expenses, Klymochko said. Josh White, former economist at the Securities and Exchange Commission and assistant professor of finance at Vanderbilt University, also said that banking on free volunteers is Reddit's biggest risk. The company would need to ramp up spending on anti-misinformation efforts especially as the U.S. prepares for the presidential election later this year, White said.
Submission + - AMD Presents New Zen 3 CPUs at AI PC Summit in Beijing (wccftech.com)
The XT series by AMD is usually seen as a generational refresh & could be seen as a "final departure" by the company made for a particular platform. The CPUs were presented beside the recent AMD presentation held during the AI PC summit in Bejing, China. Unfortunately, AMD didn't reveal any specifics about the new XT processors, nor did it "formally" unveil them, so the specifications are yet to be confirmed, but judging by what we have seen in the past, the XT series usually comes with a bump in clock speeds compared to their non-XT Ryzen counterparts, and there isn't much tinkering done with the core configurations, which is a why they are called a mere refresh. We could also expect the same with the 5000XT series CPUs, putting them in a competitive spot in the mid-range segment markets.